Aaron Klein continues his cozying up to murderous Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad with a July 10 WorldNetDaily that even grants anonymity to a member of Assad's regime.

From the article:

At least 5,000 global jihadists are positioned near Syria’s borders with Turkey and Lebanon attempting to infiltrate Syria to aid the opposition fighting Bashar al-Assad’s regime, a senior Syrian government official claimed to WND.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Syrian military hopes to quell the opposition entirely by the start of Ramadan, July 19.

Is a spokesperson for a regime accused of killing thousands of its own people really worth granting the privilege of anonymity? Klein apparently thinks so. Then again, this isn't the first time Klein has granted anonymity to terrorists.

Klein also uncritically repeated the Assad regime's spin that "it was a group affiliated with al-Qaida, armed by Turkey, that slaughtered more than 100 civilians in their homes in Houla in May." As we've previously noted, numerous named eyewitnesses have confirmed that the massacre was the work of the regime, while those pushing Assad's spin are anonymous.

Maybe that's why Klein signed on as an Assad shill -- he loves those anonymous sources. He did the same thing for Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak.

Seton Motley screeched in a July 10 NewsBusters post that "The Jurassic Press was in full-throated ObamaChorus mode in reporting on General Motors (GM)’s allegedly strong June sales," while supposedly overlooking the fact that the increase was driven by "government purchases."

Motley cited a claim from the right-wing National Legal and Policy Center that "government purchases of GM vehicles rose a whopping 79% in June," but that claim is presented without context -- it's never explained where the number came from, or what the actual numbers they're based on are. It's an empty, undocumented number, but it suits Motley's purposes, so he continued to screech:

Meaning Barack Obama is now campaigning on the “success” of - the government buying cars from...the government’s car company. With our money.

That’s like you setting up a lemonade stand for your kids. You buy them the lemons, sugar, cups and pitchers - and then buy most of the lemonade yourself.

Except you are President Obama. Your kids are the United Autoworkers Union. And the lemonade cost $50 billion.

At least you get to tax your neighbors for the $50 billion.

Again - in what Bizarro-world is this auto bailout the “success” the Jurassic Press incessantly reports it is?

Meanwhile, more credible and non-hysterical sources had a more realistic take on GM's numbers. The Detroit Free Press points out that fleet sales, under which government sales fall, typically peak this time of year:

GM’s increase was helped by an increase in fleet sales. GM’s sales to fleet customers increased 36% in June while retail sales increased 7.9%.

McNeil said GM’s big increase in fleet sales is was driven by seasonal deliveries.

For the year, GM expects fleet sales to government agencies, daily rental companies and commercial customers to account for about 25% of its sales.

Further, Bloomberg reports that the percentage of fleet sales at GM is actually smaller than that of a certain other auto manufacturer that didn't take a bailout:

GM sales to fleet customers, such as governments and rental-car companies, rose 36 percent last month, making up 32 percent of the company’s sales. Ford said its fleet sales accounted for 35 percent of its deliveries, down from 37 percent a year earlier.

Don't wait up for Motley to tell the full truth about GM's sales numbers. That's not the business he's in.

NEW ARTICLE: Joe Kovacs vs. 'Real News'Topic: WorldNetDaily
The WorldNetDaily executive news editor says he joined WND to report "real news" -- you know, like anti-Obama conspiracy theories or what Rush Limbaugh says on his radio show. Read more >>

Fox News' anti-Obama bias is already pretty prodigious. But it's not enough for Accuracy in Media's Cliff Kincaid -- he wants Rupert Murdoch to order his channel to hurl even more dubious smears against the president (and bring back the discredited Glenn Beck while he's at it).

While O’Reilly and Sean Hannity have examined some of the controversy over Obama’s socialist agenda, there is a bigger story to tell—one that could win the channel a major journalism prize. It is the Obama connection to Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis.

Of course, if Murdoch wants to get tough, he could start by bringing back Beck—Glenn Beck, that is. Glenn Beck wasn’t afraid to tell the truth about Obama—and his associates, such as Van Jones, and Obama’s patron, George Soros. That may have been what got him fired.

[...]

At about the same time, Joel Gilbert’s provocative film, “Dreams from My Real Father,” is scheduled for official release. Fox News could and should cover it now. I’m sure Gilbert would provide a copy to them, if they do not already have it. I have seen this film in advance. It, too, is devastating. It will make you wonder what we really know about Obama, not in terms of where he was born, but his political agenda and personal loyalties.

[...]

These two researchers, [Paul] Kengor and Gilbert, could explain, better than anyone, the mystery in the Oval Office. All that it would take is an order from Murdoch to Roger Ailes, president of Fox News, to get to the bottom of the controversy over Obama’s Marxist roots. Four years after Obama was elected president, isn’t it about time for what the late Andrew Breitbart called “the Vetting?”

As we've pointed out, the central argument of Gilbert's film -- that Davis is Obama's real father -- is nothing but conjecture and speculation, based on photos of a woman he can't even prove is Obama's mother who posed nude for Davis. It's nothing more than a sleazy smear piece designed to make money off Obama-haters.

But Kincaid is gullible enough -- and enough of an Obama-hater -- to fall for it, and that's all that matters at AIM.

A July 9 WorldNetDaily article claims that that "Christian leader" Ruben Israel is "working with the American Freedom Law Center" to go after officials in Dearborn, Mich., because police offers purportedly "threaten[ed] Christians with disorderly conduct while angry Muslims were heaving chunks of concrete, stones, bottles and debris at them.

Second, WND downplays the fact that Israel's band of protesters at the Dearborn Arab event -- whom the article portrays as doing little more than "holding signs about their faith"-- were taunting and inciting the group of Muslims that eventually retaliated. As we detailed, the Christ and Pop Culture blog reported that Israel's group was carrying a pig head on a pole -- as Israel explained to police, that's because Muslims are “petrified” of pigs and so it “ke

Third, it's simply false that police did nothing to stop the conflict between the Muslim and Christian groups. According to the Christ and Pop Culture blog, police intervened several times.

But WND clearly has no intention of reporting the full truth about this incident -- the article's awkward statement that "WND later learned that the Christian crowd had been carrying a pole with a pig’s head attached to the top, further angering the Muslim crowd" tells us that WND originally promoted this story with no evidence whatsoever that Israel provoked the Muslims. Thus its readers will never know how hateful Ruben Israel is -- or that he doesn't have a case.

Will Noel Sheppard Acknowlege Joan Walsh's Criticism? (Or Will He Continue to Behave Like A Jerk?)Topic: NewsBusters

We know that NewsBusters associate editor Noel Sheppard is ultimately kind of a coward -- after all, he has blocked us from following his Twitter account. Now, he is similarly silent about a commentator who has responded to his petulant attacks.

In a July 4 NewsBusters post, Sheppard goes off on Salon's Joan Walsh for (accurately) describing Republicans as "a white, older base that doesn’t quite understand the way healthcare works" during an appearance on Tavis Smiley's show. He did this mostly by insulting and personally attacking Walsh:

Let's call a spade a spade: the arrogance, hypocrisy and racism of Salon's Joan Walsh knows no bounds.

[...]

Lest we forget this is the same woman who in March wrote a column titled "What's the Matter With White People" and is so proud of the idea she's turning it into a book.

You see, racism for Walsh is a common theme to be repeated whenever possible.

As for Republicans being "worried that some people are going to get something for nothing," shouldn't that concern all Americans?

Or is the country Walsh pines for one where a growing majority of idle citizens take from the decreasing minority that actually work for a living?

Yes, those last two questions were rhetorical.

As for Walsh, she sadly represents the voices on the far-left in this nation that don't believe people are entitled to more if they work harder and smarter than others, and even more sadly speaks for those that still want to divide this nation along racial lines.

How someone so arrogant, bigoted, and closed-minded could become the editor at large of any publication in this country today is both shocking and disheartening.

Even worse, Walsh has now become a mainstay on that joke of a so-called "news network" MSNBC.

You can't swing a dead cat anymore without hitting her on some MSNBC program spewing her divisive opinions.

Let's hope it's so frequent that viewers have become numb to her much as they did Keith Olbermann.

The next day, Walsh responded on her Salon blog, marvelously (to borrow a Sheppard-ism) calling Sheppard "umbrage-addicted" and defending her views:

We are living in a moment when right-wing extremists are casting any critical observation about white people as racism — and the mainstream media, already tongue-tied about race, has no idea how to respond.

Ironically, I get criticized from the left sometimes for downplaying the role that race plays in the backlash against President Obama. More frequently, though, I’m trashed from the right for overplaying it. Journalists like to comfort themselves by saying that when both sides are mad at you, you must be doing something right. But I know from experience: Sometimes it means you’re wrong. I don’t think I’m wrong here – although occasionally I am wrong about this tough racial stuff. I’m just wondering if it’s possible to get it right, in an atmosphere where one side is determined to prove the divisive and ludicrous idea that Obama-era liberalism is animated by anti-white racism.

But it is just a fact that Republicans today are disproportionately white and older than the rest of the country. It’s almost certainly a fact that Mitt Romney is more comfortable around white people (unless he leads a secret multi-culti life that we don’t know about). Look at his crowds. Look at his friends. Look at his advisors. Look at that video where he sings “Who Let the Dogs Out?” with black people on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Jacksonville, Fla.

[...]

I’m flat-out stunned at the way the right has managed to push this notion that whites are suffering a new surge of racism, mainly at the hands of African-Americans and their liberal allies of other races. Like me. In his shrieky best seller, “Suicide of a Superpower,” Pat Buchanan warned that even Obama-supporting whites would soon “discover what it is like to ride in the back of the bus.” Rush Limbaugh has called me “the real racist” (and more affectionately, “the Magic Honky”). The late Andrew Breitbart, who made me a special target (although, affectionately, he often remarked that he liked my hair), lived to find “reverse racists,” but particularly black “racists.” He thought he found one in Shirley Sherrod, but of course he was wrong; she was the opposite of a racist. His spawn think they found one in Joe Williams. They’re wrong, too.

Over on the white nationalist site Stormfront, they didn’t like my interview with Tavis Smiley, either. (Sorry, I won’t link there.) The more sympathetic Stormfront posters want me to know that I’ll be a victim of anti-white genocide thanks to my Obama support; the idiots want to know if I’m Jewish, even though I told Smiley I’m Irish Catholic. But then the KKK hated Catholics as well as Jews and blacks, so maybe it doesn’t matter.

[...]

I guess I’m going to find out soon. My book comes out Aug. 13 – you can pre-order it here. I’m going to send a copy to Noel Sheppard. Maybe he’ll see my argument with a little more clarity.

Will Sheppard act like a gentleman for once when he gets that book and seriously consider Walsh's views instead of spewing kneejerk right-wing talking points?

To borrow another Sheppard-ism: Yes, that was a rhetorical question.

UPDATE: Guess who else agrees with Walsh's assessment? None other than Republican strategist Ed Rollins In a Fox News appearance, Rollins said of the Republican Party: "It is a bunch of old, white guys, and unfortunately, a lot of them are fat like me – like Haley Barbour, my former deputy, and others."

What explains Chief Justice Roberts’ conversion from one who had decided to strike down Obamacare to a justice who dishonestly twisted and perverted the law to uphold it as constitutional? Was it simply a desire, as some political and legal pundits have speculated, to allegedly “save” the institution of the court by caving in to the left – which in recent years had railed against the conservative majority – and kissing the derriere of President Obama himself? In this way was Chief Justice Roberts painting “his” court as the court for all people, be they left, right, black or white ? Or was it something more sinister? Given real-world realities, you have to ask whether Roberts was bribed or blackmailed into precipitously turning tail and casting his lot with the socialists.

Decades ago, no rational person would have even dared to think such a thought. But with each passing decade since the 1950s – which it now appears were the pinnacle in America’s post-war rise to power and greatness – the ethics, morals and honesty of our public officials in particular have decayed into the slimy free fall the nation now finds itself in. So why is this such a far-fetched proposition?

Was Chief Justice Roberts was bribed, blackmailed or just playing political games with his Obamacare change of heart? As the old proverb goes, “Where there is smoke there is usually fire.” Since judges and, in this case, justices should not be treated as royalty, and certainly are not above the law, is it not reasonable for Roberts to be thoroughly investigated over his lawless actions?

The lesson here for conservatives is one many do not want to face. The Roberts ruling upholding Obamacare was not based on principles found in the Constitution, and better constitutional arguments would not have changed his mind. Roberts’ decision is incoherent and contradictory if you try to follow his argument on constitutional grounds. The Roberts ruling can only be understood as a surrender of constitutional argument to political argument, and it is a political argument based on cultural status. No judge wants to be on the “wrong side of history.”

The lesson here is sobering, indeed alarming, for citizens who revere the Constitution and look to the Supreme Court as the ultimate safeguard against unchecked government power. That bulwark has never been perfect, but now it is in tatters.

When our “best and brightest” go over to the dark side, we are on a downward path Tocqueville’s “soft despotism” and maybe worse. Patriots now have no alternative but to consider new strategies and new weapons if liberty is to be preserved on this much wider battlefield.

Dan Gainor uses a July 5 MRC Business & Media Institute column to complain about liberals accusing Republican of intentionally sabotaging the economy to ensure it remains bad so President Obama will lose in November and for them calling that alleged behavior "treason."

First, Gainor never really disproves this theory, turning it around into more Obama-bashing:

The idea in all this is almost laughable. Democrats are so sure that they are right and righteous can find no other explanation for the continued economic downturn. Unemployment spent three and a half years at 5 percent or below under President George W. Bush. It has spent nearly an identical time under Obama above 8 percent. At the same time even the most supportive news outlets have been forced to cover the national cataclysm in household wealth where the median household lost 39 percent since 2007.

There is no way to spin those statistics except failure. So if Obama the All Knowing has failed, well it must be the fault of the GOP.

Political watchers would say conservatives, like Texas Gov. Rick Perry, have also used the term. That’s true. The difference is media types skewered him for it. Now it’s becoming commonplace for prominent Democrats and their supporters to claim any opposition to the president is “treason.” No, it’s called freedom. The people who declare all political opposition to be treason usually run third world dictatorships.

You know who else called a decision that disagreed with his political philosophy treason? Gainor's boss, Brent Bozell.

As we noted, Bozell declared that Chief Justice John Roberts was a "traitor to his philosophy" for not ruling the way he wanted on the constitutionality of health care reform, later insisting that Roberts is "He is a traitor to strict constitutionalism, whether he folded to Obama or to his image-manufacturing bullies in the media."

Gainor won't take umbrage at that, of course. He knows which side his bread is buttered on, and who butters it.

Maybe the 750 black people fighting early this morning in the Hamptons village of Riverhead, N. were upset at the light sentence handed out to the man who broke into rap mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs’ nearby home.

Or maybe they were exercising their right “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Or maybe that is just how they roll in Riverhead.

We may never know, because, except for the bare bones, the newspapers are not reporting it and the police are not saying.

Of course, we know how Flaherty and WND roll -- demonize black people in order to make their largely white readership afraid of them.

CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey has a fixation on counting certain words President Obama uses, as we've documented. He even devoted an entire column to complaining that "President Obama used the first-person singular pronoun 'I' 34 times on Monday when he announced he was nationalizing General Motors. He used 'Congress' once and 'law' not at all."

Get used to this peculiar brand of Obama-hate, because Jeffrey goes all OCD on us again in a July 6 "news" article:

Speaking in Sandusky, Ohio on July 5, President Barack Obama used the first-person pronouns “I” and “me” a combined 117 times in a speech that lasted about 25 minutes and 32 seconds.

Obama used “I” 98 times and “me” 19 times, according to a transcript of the speech posted by the White House. A videotape of the speech posted on YouTube shows that Obama spoke for about 25-and-a-half minutes.

During this speech, Obama used “I” or “me” approximately once every 13.09 seconds.

Yes, Jeffrey devoted an entire article to this, and he thinks it's "news." It's just more Obama-hate from Jeffrey, and he's obviously getting desperate if he's reviving the word-count stuff.

WND's Farah Forgets About His Own Teenage Right-Wing PhenomTopic: WorldNetDaily

Joseph Farah spends his July 6 WorldNetDaily column dissing Jonathan Krohn, the teenager who has rejected the conservativsm he spouted at 13 at CPAC and is now a liberal-leaning college student-to-be:

According to the article, “Jonathan Krohn took the political world by storm at 2009′s Conservative Political Action Conference when, at just 13 years old, he delivered an impromptu rallying cry for conservatism that became a viral hit and had some pegging him as a future star of the Republican Party.”

Somehow I missed this memorable speech – or forgot it. He also wrote a book called “Defining Conservatism,” which is currently ranked 2,338,880 at Amazon – and not rising.

What is Krohn talking about today? The 17-year-old’s 15 minutes of fame is based on what he said and wrote when he was a 13-year-old conservative.

But wait -- didn't Farah and WND have their own teenager spouting conservative platitudes at one point? Yes, they did.

Kyle Williams started his WND column in 2001 at the tender age of 12. As we detailed at the time, Williams wasn't offering anything terribly original, just spouting right-wing talking points.Farah wasn't mocking his age or purported wisdom then, as this introductory article shows:

Williams’ column is called “Veritas,” and he focuses like a laser beam on the deeper truths he has discovered in his young life.

“Home-schooled in rural Oklahoma, Williams gives us faith that America really does have a bright future,” said Joseph Farah, editor and chief executive officer of WorldNetDaily. “I have every confidence that Williams’ writing will be as inspirational to WorldNetDaily readers – young and old – as I found them.”

He’s no one-trick-pony, this Kyle Williams. Week after week, he has turned in very professional work. He meets his deadlines. He writes provocatively and persuasively. I find him to be inspirational – redefining our expectations of just what young teen-agers are capable of doing.

If you aren’t already checking out his column on Saturdays in WorldNetDaily, I really urge you to do so. And drop young Kyle an encouraging e-mail if you agree with me he’s something special.

But that wasn't all:

Shortly after I founded a new book-publishing partnership with Thomas Nelson Publishers – WND Books – I twisted a few arms and secured the young Mr. Williams his first book contract.

Now, in addition to being America’s youngest weekly pundit, he may also be America’s youngest non-fiction author. Kyle Williams’ “Seen and Heard” is out. I want to ask you to consider buying the book by this gifted young prodigy and perhaps giving it to your son, daughter or grandchild to help raise their own expectations about what they can achieve if they simply put their mind to it.

That's right -- like Krohn, Williams wrote a book. According to Amazon, it's ranked right now at 4,256,981, a couple million titles below Krohn's book.

WND stopped carrying Williams' column in 2005, and he pretty much disappeared from the scene. The most recent information we could find on him was a series of columns he wrote in 2009 for the student newspaper at the University of Oklahoma, where he was "a history and classics sophomore" at the time. His ideology appears not to have changed much -- some of those columns served up conservative viewpoints.

Since being homeschooled was one of his original calling cards and he once bragged about giving up on public schooling after a single semester, Williams' going to a public university is presumably a huge disappointment to Farah, who sends his own kids to the far-right Christian, homeschooler-friendly Patrick Henry College.

Did Farah forget about the right-wing teen phenom he nurtured and published, or is Williams' going to a public school too much for the guy? Either way, mocking Krohn for being a conservative teen star who changed his views is rather petty -- and, given the existence of Kyle Williams, more than a little hypocritical.

The Media Research Center is very angry about the mere existence of a movie about a stuffed bear.

In a June 29 MRC Culture & Media Institute item, Lauren Thompson vents her rage at the Todd McFarlane film "Ted":

“Ted” is a living teddy bear that’s been John’s (Mark Wahlberg) best friend since he was little. John is now in his 30s, and the two share a bachelor pad. Ted’s tastes, according to the trailer, run to bong hits, cocaine, multiple hookers, humping inanimate objects, voyeurism and brawling.

[...]

So it’s pretty much “Family Guy” in theatrical release. McFarlane, a strident liberal, has never taken the high road with that cartoon.

Thompson is even more offended that other people like it:

The Kansas City Star thinks all that is just awesome. “There are feverishly inappropriate jokes that will live on in dorm-room bull sessions forever. When skirt-chasing Ted lands a job as a grocery clerk, he and a busty co-worker, make the stockroom their love nest. You may never look at parsnips again without snickering.” Wow. You can pay $10 (plus popcorn) for sex jokes involving parsnips.

The New York Times, perhaps mindful that its high-brow readers tend to approve of sex with root vegetables only when it occurs in art museums at taxpayer-expense, was more measured. “Sexual and flatulence-based gags are accompanied by the usual side dishes: warmed-over pop-cultural references and cheap-shot jabs at celebrities and ethnic minorities,” the Times warned. But, “There are some genuinely, wildly funny bits in the movie — a brutal motel-room fistfight between Ted and John; a cocaine-fueled talking binge; a few choice insults and smutty riffs.”

Thompson provided no evidence she has actually seen the film she's bashing.

Then again, neither has Brent Bozell, who devotes his July 6 column to "Ted"-bashing:

Seth MacFarlane, whose $100 million contract with Fox makes him the highest paid TV writer in history, is now trying to take over the cineplex, with the same old shtick. You could pluck his oeuvre out of the summer movie-preview articles without any difficulty. His was the one where the teddy bear comes to life and becomes a profane slacker who practically lives inside a bong and hires hookers in groups.

The movie's title is "Ted." It won its opening weekend with a $54 million gross at the box office. Clearly, MacFarlane's fans cannot consume enough of his pop-culture sewage.

Bozell hates the film (which it isn't clear he hasn't seen) so much, in fact, that he gives away the ending. Which tells us Bozell doesn't care about movies at all and simply wants to destroy the movie-going experience for any film he doesn't think other people should watch. Which is better known as censorship.

WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah is getting more paranoid by the day, and he picked the perfect outlet to express it: the radio show of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

A July 5 WND article by Chelsea Schilling kicks off with some primo paranoia from Farah:

His private property was scouted by a drone that sounded “like a lawnmower buzzing over my head,” WND Editor and CEO Joseph Farah revealed on the July 5 Alex Jones Show.

“I’m taking my dog for a walk and guess what I see right over the tree line right above my head is a drone,” he said. “I don’t live in the city, I don’t live in a populated area, I live in one of the most rural places you could possibly live in Northern Virginia and there could only be one thing that this drone was spying on and that would be me, that would be my property because there’s just nothing else around except woods and deer.”

Farah joked that the drone might have been spying on him because he qualifies as a “terrorist” in a new Department of Homeland Security report that defines “extreme right-wing” terrorists as Americans who are “reverent of individual liberty.”

As we documented, Farah is simply lying about the conclusions of that report.

But Farah wasn't done freaking out:

“We’ve got our work cut out for us. More and more, I realize that the liberty lovers out there really have to stick together,” he urged. “Fundamentally, we’ve got to stick together, or we’re going to hang together, as our founders said.

“Look – this is the first term – if he’s re-elected it’s going to be war – they will be at war – we will be hunted down like dogs, keep that in mind, that’s what the stakes are,” warned Farah.

Farah continued, peddling the discredited conspiracy theory that the Fast & Furious gun-walking scandal was designed to undermine gun rights in the U.S.:

Then, near the 19:00 mark, Farah called “Fast & Furious” one of “the biggest government scandals I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime.”

President Obama is guilty of “treason of the highest order” for his role in the scandal, Farah declared.

“It seems more and more clear every day that this was a government operation with the motivation behind it to disarm Americans and to make the case against individual ownership of firearms for Americans,” he explained. “And the sneaky way they did that was to show how nasty these guns are because they’re too available in America, and we let them go over the border to Mexico, and they wind up in the hands of drug cartels and people get murdered. The scenario worked out just the way they planned it, except for the fact that it blew up in their face, to a certain extent, because the American people found out about it.”

Farah exclaimed, “You talk about impeachable offenses? This is beyond impeachable! This is treason of the highest order. … This goes right to the very top.”

The crazier Farah gets, the more he discredits himself and his website. Fortunately for the rest of us, he doesn't seem to have realized that.